Everything in Jordan is an Adventure. Even the Internet.

So for two weeks now, we've been without Internet at the apartment because we were deciding what to do with our old Internet and figuring out how to get a new Internet service.

The provider we used at our old apartment is a satellite technology, which means that we basically have a modem router that collects an Internet signal from outside, not from a land line or cable. But I wasn't sure if we would be able to pick up that signal from our new house. I asked around and was told to check with the biggest service provider. I wandered over to their store, didn't like what I saw (they said we would have to wait EIGHT DAYS for Internet! Pff!), and called our old standby.

First of all, the dude on the phone asked where I lived. I gave him a detailed mental map of our area, down to the school across the street and what I could see out my window. He said that only parts of our street were covered. So they would have to send a man out to see if we were even on the right side of the street for a signal. A'adi.

So I waited around for the gentleman to show up. He did, brought a modem with him and proceeded to tell me we have an excellent signal in our TV room. First bit of good news all day. We discuss prices, grab the contract and are ready to go. And then he asks to see my residency card. Oh crap.

"Um. Ha ha," I said cleverly. "I don't really have one yet. But we are right now in the process of getting them!" I added with a feverish grin, all the while thinking I would cheerfully hold everyone involved in my residency application process over hot coals if I would not get Internet until I was a resident. "Do you want to see my visa? My passport? Anything? Ha ha?"

It turns out that no, the visa was not good enough. Neither was the passport. I finally had the bright idea to pull out Heather's contract with the school to prove we worked and lived here in Jordan (the fact that we were standing in the living room of my apartment was apparently not enough proof, nor was the pile of cash I was attempting to hand over.). This is good, the guy said, but I need to know that you STILL work here. (Apparently the fact that the contract was until June of next year wasn't good enough either.)

(P.S. The guy was actually super nice about all this; it was just a frustrating situation.)

So we worked out an arrangement where I would keep the modem, pay him the money and then go to school the next day and get a letter from my boss that said I still worked there. We signed the contract, and everything was peachy.

But why on Earth is nothing in Jordan ever simple?

Random Bits of News

First of all, a big hip-hip-HOORAY because we finally have Internet at our new apartment! No, it is not wireless yet, and yes, only one of us can be on it at a time, but it's a start. It's a start.

To make matters even more attractive, we also have HOT WATER! Today was the first hot shower I've had since Thanksgiving. It was nice. It was very nice.

I also got a great haircut today from an excellent hairdresser. So my hair is clean and curled AND I took a hot shower. Life is good.

We did have a bit of annoying news today. Heather, Lena and I had asked for some days off before Christmas so we could all go home and see our families. We are leaving on the 18th and are all coming back the 30th, 31th and 1st, respectively, because we had to be at school on the 2nd. NOW they tell us that we don't have to be back until the 4th. I know it is just two more days, but I would have really liked to have spent that time with my family. Uncool. And the reason behind the change? Shockingly, the school realized that the 1st of January is New Year's Day and thus a holiday. Who would have guessed it.

Water Troubles

Water. We drink it. We bathe with it. We use it constantly in every part of our lives. And now I live in the desert, where water is a precious, precious commodity.

Unlike in America, where water appears magically in our houses via pipes, the water in Jordan is delivered to each apartment every week. The complexes all have water tanks on the roofs that are filled up once a week. That is all the water you get for the entire week unless you pay more money.

Once in Daheit al Rasheed, we ran out of water. We don’t know how, but we speculated that it involved a leak because we had never before nor after used up our entire tank. We spent the remaining two days of our week with no water. It was unpleasant.

Since moving in to our new place, we’ve had even more water trouble. We moved in on Monday and found out Tuesday morning that our water heater wasn’t working. No hot water. On Wednesday night, a repair man came over and fixed it. We were fine until Saturday morning when we ran out of water completely. Apparently, no one had opened up our tank so that we got our share of the delivered water, so we had been using up whatever was left from the people before us.

As we had a dinner the next day, we ran around all afternoon trying to remedy the situation. A guy came over and ran a line from another empty apartment’s tank into ours so we could steal their water. Our tank was refilled for real on Wednesday, so we are back on the water circuit.

This time, we made it five days without a problem. Yesterday, Heather was doing a load of clothes and found out that the entire socket that the washing machine and the water heater is plugged into isn’t working. So once again, we have no hot water. Even better, it’s Eid right now, so we probably won’t be able to get it fixed until after the holidays because, again, the entire country basically stops for Eid.

Normally, we could run over and take showers at Lena’s house, which is only a seven-minute walk. That indeed was our plan until last night, when Lena told us that her apartment was out of water as well. They had gone through their entire tank in a day and a half. Somebody has a leak.

The three of us might be a tiny bit smelly by the end of Eid. Methinks it might be time to hit the Turkish baths.

A Jordanian Thanksgiving 2

As if one day of absolute digestive nightmares wasn’t enough, I actually had two days of edible bliss. Yesterday, I was invited to two separate Thanksgiving dinners, one right after another. I got up yesterday morning fully intending to go to bed that night with an extremely upset stomach. And I was not disappointed.

It started out with a dinner at my dear cousin’s father-in-law’s house in Abdoun. At 1:30 p.m., I headed over to Samir’s absolutely magnificent house. Once there, I played with the kids while Melissa made Aunt Sue’s famous crab dip in the kitchen. I alternated between hanging out with the kids and speaking to three American girls I just met while the food was being prepared. We stood in a group drinking white wine, which I found out was a dangerous pastime as servers kept walking around filling up our wine glasses every time we took a drink.

Finally at about 3 p.m., supper was served. It was magnificent. There were two turkeys, one overflowing with stuffing. There were several vegetables and three different kinds of sweet potato. We ate our fill, then chatted amicably until dessert. Lissa and the kids had made cookies and two cobblers. There was also pecan pie and a pumpkin cheesecake. I was quite stuffed by the end of it.

At 4:30 p.m., rather full, I hopped in a taxi and headed to my second dinner at Lena’s house. I got to walk up Rainbow Street to work off some of those calories and was almost ready not to explode when I started eating there as well.

We passed an extremely pleasant seven hours continuously eating, drinking, telling jokes and singing. It was a great Thanksgiving.

I did go to bed with a very sore stomach. I think I’ll walk to Israel tomorrow to work off a fraction of what I’ve eaten this week.

A Jordanian Thanksgiving

In honor of the glorious American tradition of eating until you make yourself sick, Heather and I decided to host a Thanksgiving Dinner in our apartment six days after moving in.

In the days before the big event, we spent cleaning up the apartment and buying various necessities, such as serving dishes, lamps, a turkey, etc. I was to make the turkey, the stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, an apple pie and a pumpkin pie. Heather was going to make green bean casserole and sweet potato casserole.

The night before the big event, I set about making the two pies with ingredients that my terrific mother sent me from the states. Tom the turkey hung out with me in the sink. We bonded.

The next morning, I got up at 10:30 a.m. to make the stuffing and stuff Tom. I expertly crammed bread, onion and celery into Tom and put the raw turkey in a serving dish. I then walked down the streets of Jordan in my pajamas and carrying a raw turkey all the way to Lena’s house, where he would be cooked because he wouldn’t fit in our confectionary oven and Lena has an actual oven, even if it is a scary gas one. Tom was heavy.

While at Lena’s house, she told me Heather had called her this morning. Heather was sick with the flu and would not be participating in the festivities. Which meant I got to cook the entire meal myself. Lena volunteered to take over the sweet potato casserole.

I left Lena’s house and took a shower. Then Lena called me. Apparently in my absence, Tom had become anxious and was almost done cooking after only an hour. No good, especially when the dinner wasn’t until six. Lena graciously volunteered to babysit Tom all day. We turned the heat as low as we could and resolved to baste the crap out of him until dinner. Nothing in Jordan is ever simple.

I ran back to my house and started cooking. I cooked and cooked and, and just for fun, cooked some more, straight up until 5:30 p.m. Then I went to pick up Tom. If I thought Tom was heavy on the way down, his juicy, stuffed body was unbearable on the way up. I had to stop twice to rest and got many lovely stares along the way. I also nearly slopped boiling hot turkey juices down myself. Fun times. Fun times.

When, arms shaking from exhaustion and back caked with sweat, I arrived at my apartment, I finished all the rest of the cooking before the guests arrived, with the exception of the biscuits, which I asked my male Arabic friend to help me with. He promptly misread the mixing instructions, used the entire box of Bisquick, and then got the biscuits stuck to the aluminum foil he was cooking them on. We did not eat biscuits for dinner that night.

But we had enough wine and other good food to make up for it. And carrying Tom Turkey up and now was totally worth it. He was delicious. A good time was had by all. It would have been better had Heather been able to join.

Coming out of the Wardrobe? Only for C.S. Lewis.

In moving to our new place, I’ve noticed two things I found interesting about Jordanian houses.

The first thing is that though all bathrooms have toilet paper rungs, they are never used except in restaurants and businesses. Both of our houses contained perfectly good toilet paper rung spots, but you can’t find a metal bar to go through the roll to save your life. Instead, at least at our house, toilet paper is set on the bidet found in every bathroom. Or on the top of the toilet. But NOT in the toilet paper rung.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that Jordan does not believe in closets. Personal closets, storage closets, any kind of closet. In our old place, we kept our vacuum cleaner and cleaning supplies in the third bathroom that didn’t work. We kept the washing machine in Nadia’s room. Here, our cleaning supplies and washing machine take up the majority of the half bathroom. We have an ironing board randomly hanging out in the living room. And the vacuum and other stuff we didn’t want is entrenched in one of Heather’s wardrobes.

In each place, we’ve had wardrobes supplied by the house in which we can put all our clothes, stuff and shoes. This custom works well.

However, I have to think that a culture unfamiliar with closets would be missing out on an intrinsic and humorous part of our American culture. How many jokes do we have about closets? A closet intellectual. Coming out of the closet. Well, actually that’s all I can think of, but still. A wardrobe intellectual? Coming out of the wardrobe? Just doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?

Our New Abode

The day we signed the contract, we let the ink dry and then raced to the new place to check it out. Ah. Just as fabulous as we’d remembered from our two previous visits. Newish, comfortable furniture. Nice open rooms. A great view off one side of the house. And best of all, a seven-minute walk to school.

While one guy fixed various things around the apartment, I performed the most important of all our moving-in tasks: I made up my new bed.

It is a glorious thing. A double-bed, it is NOT two twins pushed together with a lumpy blanket shoved in between, so it can only be an improvement over my last sleeping spot. It has a rather impressive-looking dark wood frame, and, the best part, it comes with box springs so high that even I, massively tall, jolly green giant of the Arab world, must hop a little bit to get into it. Glorious. Please excuse the horribly grainy photos taken with my laptop computer. My good ones are not functioning properly at the moment, which leads me to think they might not be my good ones.

The rest of my room is not quite as nice, though I would have been able to put up with a sinkhole to have that bed. The furniture matches the frame, but it is showing a bit of wear in places. My desk drawer won’t open or close without quite an impressive fight, and my wardrobe, while straighter than my last one, doesn’t hold quite as much. I also do not yet have a mirror. I am working on remedying that situation. But I have two windows, one that has a pretty decent view of the city. My room also came with a cork board, to which I have already affixed pictures of many of my favorite people, and I’m working on getting the rest of you favorite people up there.

We have one and a half bathrooms, but I’m iffy about the half. That toilet tends to run, so we keep it turned off. But it’s nice to have in emergencies, such as when one of us is occupying our favorite bathroom. The bathroom with a shower is nice and spacious. It also has a whole tiny shelf more storage space than our old one. The shower has almost as much water pressure than the old place, and the toilet seat is firmly attached to the toilet, unlike in our old place.

The other bathroom is functional, but it is stuffed with cleaning supplies and a washing machine, so sitting down and taking your time in there is a mite uncomfortable.

We have two living-roomish places: a TV room with one couch and a sitting room, with one couch and some lounge chairs. The TV and cable work. I’m still trying to get our DVD player to function. I’m hoping a good cleaning will allow it to read discs again, apparently an important part of DVD functionality. The sitting room + dining room + bookshelves room allows me to display my random selection of books to our guests and gives them somewhere to sit. Plus, it looks classy.

The kitchen is also big and houses probably the least impressive of the furniture. Instead of a real stove + oven combo, we have a confectionery oven and a two-burner stove top. This makes cooking just a smidge more challenging, but I live off of falafel now anyway.

The second most annoying thing in our apartment was the lighting. All fluores- cent. Ouch. So we chipped in and bought some nice lamps to place strategically around the house to create a warm glow instead of the seizure-inducing strobe effect of the fluorescents. Nice.

The trip down the staircase of this new place is much cleaner and less smoky (remember the fire?) than our last one. We live right above the caretaker of the complex, an elderly Muslim woman, so we’ll have to keep the parties to a minimum. And at the foot of the staircase is a brief wander through a hallway adorned with plant life. Ah, greenery! And then we find our super secure front door, which comes equipped with two locks than you can’t get open even if you live here, so I know it’s keeping the bad guys out.

Did I mention it’s a seven-minute walk to work? Hello, Heaven. I have found you on Earth.